Welcome to San Francisco
San Francisco is the cultural, commercial, and financial center of Northern California. San Francisco is the
13th most populous city in the United States, and the
fourth most populous in
California San Francisco has both major, well-known neighborhoods and districts as well as smaller, specific subsections and developments.
One guidebook identifies five major districts, corresponding to the four quadrants plus a south-central district. These five broad districts, counterclockwise are Central/downtown, Richmond, Sunset, Upper Market and beyond (south-central), and Bernal Heights/Bayview and beyond (southeast).
Within each of these five districts are located major neighborhoods, and again there is considerable fluidity seen in the sources. The San Francisco Planning Department officially identifies 36 neighborhoods. A popular tourist destination, San Francisco is known for its cool summers,
fog, steep rolling hills,
eclectic mix of architecture, and landmarks, including the
Golden Gate Bridge,
cable cars, the former
Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary,
Fisherman's Wharf, and its
Chinatown district.
San Francisco is also the headquarters of five major banking institutions and various other companies such as
Levi Strauss & Co.,
Gap Inc.,
Fitbit,
Salesforce,
Dropbox,
Reddit,
Square, Inc.,
Dolby,
Airbnb,
Weebly,
Pacific Gas, and Electric Company,
Yelp,
Pinterest,
Twitter,
Uber,
Lyft,
Mozilla,
Wikimedia Foundation,
Craigslist, and
Weather Underground.
The city, and the surrounding Bay Area, is a global center of the sciences and arts and is home to a number of educational and cultural institutions, such as the
University of San Francisco (USF),
University of California, San Francisco (UCSF),
San Francisco State University (SFSU), the
De Young Museum, the
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the
SFJAZZ Center, and the
California Academy of Sciences.
